March 31, 2005

Stranger Than fiction

The ePluribus Media project has some ideas about how to run a different kind of news organization, head on over and see what you think.

A dKos diarist wonders why there hasn't been much coverage of a major oil spill on Alaska's North Slope over the weekend. My guess is that if people get to talking about it, it could kill the chances of opening the wildlife refuge to

... The restless determination of the Bush administration to reorder global affairs is well-illustrated by a classified document prepared by the US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld as a prelude to a massive review of Pentagon spending. It requires the military to build a far more proactive force focused on changing the world rather than responding to specific conflicts such as the Korean peninsula. It sees the development of very differently trained troops who would be able to intervene on a much more widespread basis. "The idea is that you would have lots of teams operating in lots of places throughout the world," a senior defence official was reported as saying. At the same time, there is an absolute belief that the US must maintain such a large lead in crucial technologies that growing powers - in other words, China - will decide that it is simply too expensive to try to compete. Welcome to the new world order as seen from Washington.

Yeah, small problem with that plan. A tragic weakness in the foundation, as with so many of their other projects. If you don't properly support education, and you start losing the foreign graduate students that fill out your university research teams, eventually your country stops being a beacon of innovation. Before, we could count on luring people who'd studied in other countries over here with high salaries, but that was before multinationals decided to start fleeing in quantity, and before places like China and India began reforming their business climates.

I've said it before, I'll say it again. When we stop making things, stop inventing things, and stop being the consumer of last resort, what use is the rest of the world going to have for us?